Bob Carr is sitting in his Bligh Street office, resplendent in a beloved Hermes tie, and contemplating the firestorm provoked by the first reports of his Diary of a Foreign Minister.

The focus - inevitably - was on his comparisons of business-class travel to ''the transatlantic slave trade'', his food and obsessive exercise regime, the gossip about John Kerry's cosmetic surgery, and the withering assessments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

Lampooned by the tabloids as a tosser and a snob, his book deemed unworthy by a Herald editorial, Carr was also grappling with enraged former colleagues labelling him a bigot and a narcissist.

''Your training as premier teaches you to face up to the disaster of the day,'' he muses, before momentarily breaking our interview to organise another with an FM music station, one of many he will do on Thursday.

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How has the reaction been from his colleagues and international interlocutors?

Not overwhelmingly positive, it seems. ''A wealth of comments,'' he says. ''I think they are all waiting for the book.''

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Carr is a self-described media ''huckster'' and former journalist, so the tenor of the coverage should not have surprised him, and may have been even strategically planned.

But the former foreign minister and premier of NSW sees his book as something more serious.

A frank, contemporaneous account of the inner workings of the government and foreign affairs: albeit leavened by wicked observations about colleagues and revelations about the author's eccentricities and obsessions.

''Australian people deserve to know how their foreign policy works,'' he says. ''One way was to tell it in a diary form rather than another burnished memoir. This is warts and all.''

Certainly, Carr's book is a rare contribution to the slim canon of Australian political diaries, and the first since Mark Latham's bile-ridden, score-settling tome in 2005.

Like Latham, Carr takes aim at his colleagues. His predecessor as foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, is described as ''purse-lipped, choirboy hair, speaking in that sinister monotone''.

Carr records how he keeps bumping into people on the diplomatic circuit who have been monstered by Rudd, from the Commonwealth secretariat to the Japanese and Singaporeans.

He portrays Julia Gillard as captive of the Melbourne-based Israel lobby and self-indulgent for refusing to step down in the face of diabolical polling due to an ''ingrained detestation'' of Rudd.

But there is a grander purpose to Carr's diaries and real insights into the workings of diplomacy, government and the intelligence communities.

As foreign minister, he runs the Australian Secret Intelligence Service - ''my own little CIA, my own spies'' - but remains an intelligence sceptic.

After a visit to the CIA's headquarters at Langley early in his days as foreign minister, he observes that the briefings were ''solid but not exciting''.

''Where were the revelations? Was there anything here that one would not pick up from The Economist, let alone cables?'' he writes. Later in the book, he reflects that ''one must not be seduced by spies and their agenda.''

Much of Carr's time is taken up with Australia's bid for a United Nations Security council seat. Australia's entry into the race is late, ''quixotic'' and ''doomed to fail'' as Finland and Luxembourg, its greatest rivals, have a six-year head-start.

Here is diplomacy at its most challenging and ridiculous as Carr corrals more than 100 nations to back Australia's bid.

He ''speed dates'' a procession of foreign ministers to push Australia's case, noting an ''edible mushroom'' project in Burundi seems to be paying off.

But Carr tells the Arab and African states - which Australia desperately needs in its corner to win - that he will moderate Australia's long-held pro-Israel stance.

When Carr is told by Gillard not to raise concerns about the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories and oppose a UN vote recognising Palestine, he is livid.

He rolls Gillard in cabinet on the UN vote, motivated by a conviction that Israel's settlement expansions have gone too far. But he concedes there are other factors - to avoid welshing on promises made to the Arab and African nations, and to shore up seats in western Sydney.

The diary dissects and debates the contest between the US and China, and how Australia should position itself between the two. The decision to allow US President Barack Obama to use Parliament to announce the deployment of marines and criticise China was a serious misjudgment, Carr argues.

He also finds Australia's 2009 Defence white paper, with its ''H.G. Wells science fiction about blockading Chinese ports and shooting off missiles'', gets repeatedly raised by diplomats as evidence Australia was at the vanguard of a US push to contain China.

Carr, a renowned US history buff, revels in his trips to Washington, the ''imperial capital''. An audience with Hillary Clinton was always ''pure champagne''.

But he wishes Australia was a ''little less craven'' in its dealings with the superpower and worries about ''American judgment''.

Readers are exposed to the debates among Australian politicians and officials, and not always to Carr's advantage. He publishes a long email from Kim Beazley explaining why the US alliance is on track, despite Carr's misgivings.

Along with the Beazley email, one of the few other documents reproduced in the book is an apology from a Singapore Airlines executive. Carr has complained to Singapore Airlines when there were no English subtitles on an in-flight screening of Wagner's opera Siegfried.

Its publication says much about the varied terrain of Carr's diary, from the great geopolitical strategic questions to petty gripes.

Bob Carr's self-regard is legendary, but the full ventilation of his vanity and entitlement mentality in this book has people wondering if the former foreign minister is engaged in self-deprecating mockery, or if his self-esteem has run wild.

Carr insists it's self-parody, but others are not so sure.

Robert Phiddian, an academic with a passion for political humour, says that Carr was a ''true satirist'' prepared to provoke and antagonise his audience.

''Bob Carr is at least as vain as your average politician,'' he wrote on The Conversation website. ''The unusual thing is that he knows it. And the shocking thing is that he doesn't seem to mind letting us know that he knows it.''

Carr tried and failed to get a cadetship at foreign affairs as a young man and had always planned on a federal parliamentary career.

Factional plays and bad luck meant he got pushed into state politics. But a confluence of unexpected events - Rudd's resignation as foreign minister and a Senate vacancy - saw him become Australia's chief envoy in the most unlikely of circumstances, albeit in a teetering government almost certain to be defeated at the next election.

If his 18 months as foreign minister was an unexpected gift, the G20 leaders meeting was the sweet realisation of Carr's dream of joining the international elite. Carr attended only because Rudd, now prime minister, was caught up in the election contest back home.

''Finally, he got there,'' says West. ''On the very day the government was being defeated.''

Whether self-mockery, or ego unleashed, perhaps Carr's most boastful passage in the book comes as he reflects on meeting Obama, Putin, Merkel and the other leaders of the G20.